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We've talked before about Apple's plans to turn future iDevices into electronic wallets, allowing you to wave your phone over a reader to pay for things. Now, there's an unsourced report claiming that Apple has a much more "revolutionary" goal: putting your entire desktop on your phone so that any Mac can become your Mac.

Leander Kahney at Cult of Mac shared the interesting revelations from a source that asks to be anonymous in a report today entitled "iPhone 5 Will Enable Ambitious Remote Computing Program." According to the source, the iPhone 5 will allow a user to "carry a lot of their desktop data and settings with them," and by merely placing their iDevice in close proximity to a compatible Mac, will be able to "load all their applications, settings and data," and "essentially turn any Apple computer into your own - like you're actually working on your own computer."

This is no mere Back to My Mac concept, the source claims, but a true cloning on your home directory on a different computer. "The user would have full access to their information in the same manner they would if they were working from home," the source continues, "even showing the same desktop picture, mouse and keyboard settings, and would eventually extend to software licenses and passwords for websites such as Facebook." And when you walk away, your data leaves with you: "All communications and storage of passwords stays on the useré─˘s iPhone, leaving nothing stored on the computer."

There's a lot that's left unsaid in this sketchy report. For one thing, obviously I wouldn't be able to load my entire 200GB home directory on any iDevice, so presumably it'd be used as more of an authentication key to data stored in the cloud. If so, this would be in line with other patent applications and rumors indicating future iPhones will be used to replace physical keys. Patents concerning technology that would allow cloud-based syncing have also been revealed over the past year, indicating that Apple's working on the networking protocols that would be required to support such a capability. And given that iTunes in the cloud has not emerged and doesn't seem to be on the horizon, this would explain Apple's need for not one, but two (maybe three) monster data centers in the North Carolina hills.

Wild rumor, sure, but this is a much closer match to the mysterious "revolutionary" feature that Apple hinted at in a job posting a few months ago than anything we've seen so far. Even if this rumor's not true in every particular, based on the various patent applications that have been documented it's almost a lock that Apple is working on something similar, though perhaps slated for release further in the future than the iPhone 5 in 2011.